Young Researcher Prizes in Quantum Electronics and Optics
The European Physical Society is delighted to announce the 2015 winners of its young researcher Prizes in Quantum Electronics and Optics. These prizes are awarded once every two years, and recognise the highest level of excellence amongst emerging researchers. The young researcher prizes include the prestigious Fresnel prize for research achievements obtained before the age of 35, as well as prizes for the best nominated European PhD theses in optics over the last two years. The awards were presented in a ceremony on 23 June at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics [CLEO], Europe and the European Quantum Electronics Conference [EQEC], held during the World of Photonics Congress in Munich, Germany.
2015 Fresnel Prizes
The 2015 Fresnel Prize for fundamental aspects was awarded to Tim Hugo Taminiau, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, for his fundamental contributions to nano-optics and quantum information science through the control of solid-state quantum emitters and spins.
Tim Hugo Taminiau is a tenure-track group leader at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology, where he studies quantum physics, quantum information and sensing based on electronic and nuclear solid-state defect spins. He graduated from the University of Twente in 2005 and obtained a PhD at the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques [ICFO] in Barcelona. In his thesis, he studied metallic nano-particles acting as antennas for optical quantum emitters. Before returning to the Netherlands as a Marie Curie Fellow in 2011, Tim Hugo Taminiau investigated optically active defects at the California Institute of Technology and Brown University in US.
The 2015 Fresnel Prize for applied aspects was awarded to Daniele Brida, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, for the development of broadly tunable few-optical-cycle laser sources and their application in the investigation of primary photo-induced processes in condensed matter systems.
Daniele Brida obtained the PhD in physics in 2010 at Politecnico di Milano, where he was appointed assistant professor at the Physics department. Later he joined the University of Konstanz first as a visiting scientist, then as leader of a research group funded by the Emmy Noether program of the DFG since 2012. His main scientific interests are the generation of broadband optical pulses ranging from UV to the THz spectral region, their temporal compression down to few optical cycles with adaptive techniques and the passive stabilization of the carrier envelope phase. He also uses ultrashort pulses to condensed-matter spectroscopy with an extreme temporal resolution.
2015 PhD Thesis Prizes
The 2015 Thesis Prizes for fundamental aspects were awarded to Tim Langen, JILA, University of Colorado and NIST, Boulder, CO, USA, for his thesis on non-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional Bose gases, and to Søren Raza, Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Odense, Denmark, for his thesis on probing plasmonic nanostructures with electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS).
Tim Langen is currently a Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellow at JILA, Boulder. His research interests include atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and quantum many-body systems. He graduated with a PhD from TU Vienna in 2013. During his PhD he has been a visiting researcher at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Søren Raza received the PhD degree in physics from the Technical University of Denmark [DTU] in 2014.. He specialized in the general field of nanophotonics, in particular nanoplasmonics. He studied the interaction of light with metallic nanostructures and amended his theoretical work with experimental results during his PhD. He is now employed as a postdoc in the Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
The 2015 Thesis Prizes for applied aspects were awarded to Tobias Herr, Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology [CSEM], Neuchâtel, Switzerland, for his thesis on solitons and dynamics of frequency comb formation in optical microresonators, and to Pete Shadbolt, Quantum Optics & Laser Science Group, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom, for his thesis on complexity and control in quantum photonics.
Tobias Herr is a researcher at the CSEM, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His research interests are time and frequency metrology, non-linear optics, laser spectroscopy and applications in astronomy. He obtained his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne [EPFL] in 2013 and his Diploma/Master in Physics in 2008 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Pete Shadbolt is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Controlled Quantum Dynamics, Imperial College, London, UK. He completed his PhD in January 2014 at the University of Bristol, where he worked on experimental optical quantum computing using waveguides. Peter’s current research focuses on large-scale architectures for linear-optical quantum computing, and potential applications including quantum chemistry and machine learning.
